carrying on with the audio theme: this evening I found the most ASTOUNDINGLY EASY TO USE audio editing software... and it is FREE. if you are curious about what great open source software looks like and how it works, take a look at the Audacity website, where you can download Audacity for free (Windows and Mac versions both available), along with download links for an MP3 Encoding Library (which for complicated international legal mumbo jumbo they cannot distribute directly with the software).

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

this program has by far the easiest to use interface of any audio editing software I have ever used (okay, so I've used like three audio editing software packages, I'm a total amateur... but Audacity is certainly easier than anything I have tried before!) - I've been wanting for over a year to do audio recordings of the readings for my course, and never could come up with audio that I liked recorded at home. either the software was a pain to use, or the quality was just wretched, or both. now I can very quickly and easily get pretty decent MP3 files with this software, no special effort required: just speak into the mic, run a couple of effects, export as MP3, done.

I was worried about what free software I could make available to students if I wanted to promote their use of audio as part of their online course experience. here's the solution!

with pleasure I went ahead and used their Amazon Honor System to make a donation to support the future development of this project, bandwidth at their website, and so on. if only the entire software world worked like this!!!


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Posted by Laura Gibbs to OU...Online at 6/8/2004 01:17:44 AM